The Paris Deadline (34 page)

     He had flown solo and nonstop across the Atlantic from New York City, in thirty-three and a half grueling hours, so heavily loaded with extra fuel that he barely cleared the telephone wires at Roosevelt Field when he took off. He was the first person in history ever to fly that far nonstop, and in doing so he not only won a $25,000 prize offered by the millionaire aviation enthusiast Raymond Orteig, he also transformed—on a gigantic Edisonian scale—the way people would live and travel for centuries. But that, like my reading of Freud, and Root's transformation into a food critic, was still to come.

     On a smaller scale, the arrival of "Lucky Lindy" in Paris was, of course, the biggest news story of the year—maybe even the single biggest news event of the whole frenetic, celebrity-mad decade of the 1920s, "Les Années Folles."

     And as the plump, jolly, red-nosed Muse of Journalism must have intended for a reason, I missed it all.

     I missed it because Herol Egan was sick that day and Root was filling in for him on the Sports Desk and because, despite our knowledge that Lindbergh had taken off the night before, nobody in Europe thought he would make it. The biggest news story of the day, everybody in Paris was convinced, would be the outcome of the men's doubles match in the French International Tennis Championships, to which, in an expansive mood and with two of Herol's free extra tickets, Root had invited Elsie and me.

     I remember well that it was a warm, sunny Saturday, perfect weather after a week of fog and drizzle. The chestnut trees along the Champs-Elysées were in full bloom, and the great avenue was green and leafy and dazzled with sunlight, like an Impressionist painting.

     We took a cab from the
Trib
and drove out to the old stadium in Saint Cloud, not the one you know now in the Bois de Boulogne, where they play what has become the Roland Garros tournament. The press box then was at the south end of the stadium, elevated over the crowd by about fifty feet. From it we could look straight down on the famous red clay of the tennis court. If you turned your head slightly to the right, you could look out across the rolling brown Seine and the Isle of Swans toward the heart of Paris.

     It was a wonderful Parisian crowd that day—the men were dressed in crisp white flannels and Panama straw hats, and the women, in their bright floppy bonnets and many-colored sun dresses, bobbed and swayed like so many blossoms in a garden, the acme of fashion in what would turn out to be the last great year of the Flapper Era. Duke Ellington would open soon at the Cotton Club in New York. Al Jolson would make the first "talkie" motion
picture, "The Jazz Singer." Babe Ruth would hit sixty home runs before the season was over, an untouchable record. Even in tennis it seemed like an annis mirabile. The day before, in the men's singles championship, the American Bill Tilden had definitively beaten little René Lacoste (the "Crocodile") in straight sets.

     That day, of course, the French were out for revenge. And indeed, Tilden and his partner Frank Hunter looked tired, while according to the sports reporters around us, the two French players, Borotra and Brugnon, were at the peak of their game.

     We sat in the box and admired the day and drank chilled Sancerre on the Colonel's expense account. Between sets Root asked about Elsie's progress on her book. She was halfway through the final revision, she reported, and Mr. Scribner in New York said he wanted to have a look. (She should call it, Root thought,
The Duck Also Rises.
) Scribner was also interested in expanding my articles on automates from the
Trib
, maybe for a companion book. From time to time we glanced over at the Diplomatic Box, where the American Ambassador Herrick Smith had gathered a large party to cheer Tilden and Hunter on. But then, a little after four o'clock, there was a stirring in the Ambassador's box, and shortly after that the Ambassador and two or three aides slipped quietly away.

     When the match was over—Tilden and Hunter lost in three sets—Root stayed in the Press Box to type his story. Elsie and I skipped the Métro (some things don't change) and walked on ahead in the gathering twilight, toward the city. Afterwards, I would learn that Ambassador Smith had left the stadium because he was told that Lindbergh, contrary to all expectations, had just been spotted over Ireland. Assuming his fuel held out, he would arrive in Paris that night, in the dark.

     If I had been paying closer attention, I might have noticed, as we made our way into the place de l'Alma, that there were almost no cars or buses on the streets, and the cafés and sidewalks were strangely empty for a Saturday night.

     In fact, as the
Trib
would later report, as soon as the news about Lindbergh began to spread, something close to ten thousand cars, taxis, trucks, and bicycles—nearly all the available vehicles in Paris, it seemed—had rushed wildly toward Le Bourget, so many of them that the four-mile road between the Porte Villette and the airfield was brought to a hopeless standstill. It was probably the first great traffic jam in European history. The police would estimate that over half a million people that night had somehow crowded onto the grass field (there were no concrete runways on it in 1927). Many of the cars and trucks were hastily lined up with their headlights on to guide the airplane in.

     Bill Shirer, always working, got there in time to see Lindbergh come out of the night sky like a shooting star and circle the field twice before he landed. When the American climbed out of his cockpit, he never touched the earth, because the cheering French instantly heaved him onto their shoulders and rushed him toward the hangar. As soon as that happened, Shirer knew he had his story and he turned around and literally ran three of the four miles back to Paris, outracing the competition, which was still caught in the traffic jam. At the Champ-de-Mars he somehow found a cab to take him the rest of the way to the rue Lamartine, where he commandeered a typewriter and Kospoth's own private sanctum. Subsequently, he would attend a two
A.M.
news conference with Lindbergh at the Ambassador's residence (the aviator wearing a pair of Smith's elephantine pajamas), in which, among other things, Lindbergh praised the American scientist Robert Goddard and his work on guided rockets and gyrocompasses.

     But all that, as I say, I missed.

     Elsie and I strolled back from the tennis court arm in arm, as couples do in Paris. Near the place de la Concorde we went across the pont Alexandre III to the Left Bank and onto the dark Esplanade of the Invalides, where the great golden dome still glowed softly in the night. We talked a little of this and that, nothing at all of Saint-Bonnet or the Bleeding Man or the fortune
lost and buried for good with Saulnay and Johannes and Armus deep below the rumbling limestone cliffs. At some point I think I looked up into the darkening sky, but I took no notice of the future, in the form of a guided machine with wings, droning past us overhead.

     And as for what became of Vaucanson's Duck? When we finally returned to Paris, its partially disassembled self was nowhere to be found, not in Madame Serboff's storeroom, not in my garret, not on the shelves of Inspector Soupel's evidence room. True to its nature, and as it had done so many times in the past, the duck had simply vanished again, though I was certain that it would turn up somewhere else one day, revived like a clockwork phoenix.

     At the corner where the rue de Bac comes down to meet the quai Voltaire, one of my favorite crossroads in Paris, Elsie stopped and sighed and looked up the river toward the gorgeous spotlit buttresses and towers of Notre Dame. They were riding the gathering darkness like a ship.

     "Would you like to go back to the rue du Dragon, Miss Short," I asked, quoting my namesake poet, "with a gray-haired gent for a spot of 'pipes and timbrels and wild ecstasy'?"

     Elsie smiled and took my arm again and we walked slowly east, along the river. "Writing Boy," she murmured.

I
NCREDIBLE AS THEY SEEM
, V
AUCANSON
, the excreting duck, the Bleeding Man, the Writing Boy, the museums of automates—all real, all as historically accurate as I could make them (it is a mystery why anybody ever called the eighteenth century the Age of Reason). For biographical information I have relied on
Jacques de Vaucanson: Mécanicien de Genie
by Andre Doyon and Lucien Liaigre. Also
Le Monde des Automates
by Alfred Chapuis,
Automata
by Chapuis and Edmond Droz, and the delightful
Edison's Eve
by Gaby Wood. Vaucanson himself wrote the book that Toby and Root read in Mrs. McCormick's hôtel suite; it was published in an English translation in 1742.

     I have drawn phrases, anecdotes, and descriptions from Waverley Root's wonderful memoir,
The Paris Edition
, and from William S. Shirer's memoir,
A Twentieth-Century Journey.
There are two very good books about the Tunnelers of World War I that I have also used for material and incidents:
Beneath Flanders Fields
by Peter Barton, Peter Doyle, and Johan Vandewalle; and Alexander Barrie's
Underground War.

     Finally, for their support and encouragement, my deepest thanks to my beautiful wife Brookes and to my friends John Lescroart and Bill Wood.

Max Byrd is the award-winning author of fourteen other books, including four bestselling historical novels and
California Thriller
, for which he received the Shamus Award. He was educated at Harvard and King's College Cambridge, England, and has taught at Yale, Stanford, and the University of California. Byrd is a Contributing Editor of
The Wilson Quarterly
and writes regularly for the
New York Times Book Review.
He lives in California.